It might be so in some other town, even Beloit, but it feels only like New York to me. I go in the room where the others are and they say, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and I drink some tea and listen and talk in fragments of half-meanings. And I get warmed and half-warmed and cooled and slightly scorched in the easeful unevenly-heated humanness of the women and men sitting around. In the inland towns they throw their thoughts and ideas at you at tea-time, inland thoughts and ideas, which hit you and then drop off like little pebbles and nuts and hard green apples. In New York they throw those things in the form of long ribbons, heated from being worn next their skin, which fly out and wrap around your skin: pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully. The point of it is that nobody is afraid of that. It is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is half-lyric. It reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my surfaces. Which are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest deeps. And it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I love New York. _Rhythm_ To-morrow Now and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm. Often I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and feel their truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm--Rhythm unspeakable and ecstatic. The prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in his utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and the laws of hygiene. He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Everybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless Rhythmic truth of health and illness. Mourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast. Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year and the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For peace: anguish. It never fails. The great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted his perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an ‘extra.’ Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an ‘extra,’ always wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-given, feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle _would_ lack humor. As a God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did: his measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his gentleness: his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in intense terrific gloom. The Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and Rhythm of sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning. Equally, half and half. The most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.